Darwin (Operating System)
Hard Drive Recovery - Darwin (Operating System)
Darwin is an open source computer operating system released by Apple Inc. in 2000. It is compliant to Portable Operating System Interface for UNIX (POSIX) and is composed of code developed by Apple as well as code derived from NEXTSTEP, FreeBSD and other free software projects.
Darwin originated from NeXT’s NEXTSTEP operating system, which was later known as OPENSTEP, first released in 1989. Apple bought NeXT in 1997, and announced it would base its next operating system on OPENSTEP. The result was Rhapsody in 1997 and Rhapsody-based Mac OS X Server 1.0 in 1999. In 2000, Rhapsody was released as Darwin open-source software under the Apple Public Source License (APSL).
Darwin is built around XNU, a hybrid kernel made up of Mach 3 microkernel, various elements of BSD and an object-oriented device driver API called I/O Kit. This model allows Mach-O binary format which allows a single executable file to support multiple CPU architectures and the mature support for symmetric multiprocessing in Mach.
Darwin currently supports both 32-bit and 64-bit variants of the PowerPC and Intel x86 processors used in the Mac and Apple TV. It also supports the 32-bit ARM processor used in the iPhone and iPod Touch. An open-source port of the XNU kernel also supports Darwin on Intel and AMD x86 platforms not officially supported by Apple.
Darwin allows a large number of programs written for various UNIX-like systems to be compiled on it with no changes to the source code.
